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Saturday, 20 July 2013

Elop reveals why Nokia didn't adopt Android

Nokia, which has adopted the Windows Phone operating system for its smartphones, is better placed without Android, according to its chief Stephen Elop.

Without naming Samsung, Elop said the Android ecosystem has been dominated by one dominant player and he is happy that Nokia decided against opting for the Android few years back.

"I'm very happy with the decision we made. What we were worried about a couple of years ago was the very high risk that one hardware manufacturer could come to dominate Android.

We had a suspicion of who it might be, because of the resources available, the vertical integration, and we were respectful of the fact that we were quite late in making that decision. Many others were in that space already," Elop said in an interview given to The Guardian.

"Now fast forward to today and examine the Android ecosystem, and there are a lot of good devices from many different companies, but one company has essentially now become the dominant player," he further added.

Back in the year 2011 Nokia decided to slowly move away from Symbian. However, instead of going for Android - a platform that all other handset manufacturers were opting for except BlackBerry - the Finnish handset company adopted Microsoft's Windows platform for its smartphones.

At that time the choice of Microsoft Windows mobile operating system seemed a bit off from a manufacturer like Nokia. But no reasons were given back then to support the move.

Though, Samsung is the top Android smartphone maker but it was HTC who first launched an Android smartphone, the HTC Dream, in October 2008. Samsung joined the race the following year, in June 2009, when it launched Samsung i7500/ Galaxy.

Nokia is currently manufacturing smartphones with Windows Phone operating system only. It will though provide support to its Symbian based devices till 2016.

But despite Elop's rhetoric's now, Nokia may well join the race if its shipments of Windows devices continue to fall in future.